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Szijjarto urges UN guarantees to help persecuted Christians

A new world order is taking shape, bringing with it new security risks which Europe and the world must be ready to tackle, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in New York on Monday.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the United Nations’ inaugural Nelson Mandela Peace summit, Szijjarto said the meeting should be used to identify the factors that pose the biggest threat to global security and world peace.

The minister highlighted three such factors: migration, the mistreatment of minorities and religious persecution.

As regards migration, he said the problem persisted because “Europe is still incapable of speaking straightforwardly about it or making it clear that only legal entry to Europe is allowed.”

Regarding minorities, Szijjarto said Hungary was also a victim of the mistreatment of minorities. He argued that ethnic Hungarians in western Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region were facing “systematic intimidation and the Ukrainian state wants to take away their rights”. The view that national minorities are potential sources of conflict rather than assets is prevalent in many parts of the world, he added.

On the topic of religious persecution, he called it “especially sad” that Christianity “has become the most persecuted religion in the world”. The United Nations should provide “legal and security guarantees” to ensure that persecuted Christian communities could “return to their homelands of centuries”, he told MTI earlier that day, adding that Christianity “has become the most persecuted religion in the world” and argued that globally out of five people persecuted because of their religious beliefs, four were Christian. But the world, he insisted, “turns its back on the problem because straightforward discourse on the situation of Christian communities is not compatible with hypocritical global politics”.

The minister referred to a separate meeting of European Union foreign ministers to be held in New York to discuss the situation in Syria and Libya. Europe, he said, must find a way to “stop Libya from becoming a passageway”. “Because now illegal migrants can pass through Libya unimpeded, they can board vessels and arrive at Europe’s southern shores.”

The minister also underlined the importance of focusing the EU’s operations in the Mediterranean on sealing off the bloc’s maritime borders rather than on bringing illegal migrants onto the continent. The EU must also make it clear that the Mediterranean Sea is not an entry route into Europe for illegal migrants, he added. It should also be made clear that illegal entry is not on option on land, either, Szijjarto said, adding that Hungary had already shown this to be the case.

Szijjarto said the UN’s session this week will focus on the world’s most serious armed conflicts, the situation in Africa, crimes against humanity as well as the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities.